As society becomes more interconnected where people and entities can interact through network connected platforms, the ability to give one's approval and the ability to access a resource together with others, for example, as a group, are desired even when the people are not in the immediate vicinity of one another. For example, a child may want to receive permission from two parents to watch a movie, but neither one of the parents is present. Another example is where business partners wishing to sign off on large financial transactions together while working remotely from one another. In yet another example, separate individuals located in various locations may wish to access the same webpage for the same account at the same time. Some other situations require not the approval of all parties, but a certain percentage, even if only the minority. For example, updating software may require approval from only some developers and a single project manager. Upon a suggested change, parties may want to quickly approve or veto it with a vote. Another situation may require knowledge of which users of a group acknowledge something to be true or wish to opt into something. This could be for agreeing to terms and conditions or responding to invitation to an event.
Current solutions are often built specifically to solve an individual problem and cannot be applied elsewhere without major changes. Such solutions include calling multiple people to ask for approval, or physically meeting with others and giving verbal approval. Some approval systems require a single person to approve an action with signature then send it to the next person in a chain of approval. If somewhere along the chain there is a denial, it will have to go all the way back to the beginning of the chain to restart. Current voting solutions simply measure the volume of cheering, or quick hands raised estimate. In the case of shared accounts, an individual linked to a single account has to share a password or the details required for authentication. This is becoming increasingly difficult with secure means of authentication requiring multiple factors that are not so easily shared between users. For example, the two-man rule is a control mechanism that requires the presence of two authenticated people in order to obtain access or perform an action, Shamir's secret sharing is a cryptographic algorithm that allows secret sharing by dividing a secret into parts and giving each participant its own unique part where all the parts need to be combined to reconstruct the secret. Also, a separate system of auditing access has to be logged in order to keep track of which users had access to the account at specific times.
On the other hand, accounts are often tied to groups rather than individuals and the policies that define their access may include one or many of the members of the group. Even more often, accounts are tied to or meant for individuals when it is the desire of a multi-user entity to be represented as such with access available to the entirety of its members and not just an individual.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide systems and methods for an authentication platform that maps users to a group and device to users, with the capability to send authentication requests to user devices within that group. The authentication platform also has a configurable set of policies as to what defines a successful group authentication.